this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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"pronounced like it's spelled" doesnt help the average english native speaker, because english spelling is stupid. you can see this when they try to pronounce any unfamiliar/foreign word and they just randomly skip letters or insert new ones. their default strategy seems to be to expect every unfamiliar word to be like "through".
If you were taught to read in an American school up until like 10-15 years ago you would’ve been taught phonics, and how to “sound out” a word, and then over time you learn lots and lots of exceptions. Most American adults should be able to read Zohran’s name and pronounce it correctly the first time, it lines up with default American English pronunciation rules.
Doesn't he pronounce the in his name? That's not really a thing in American English - /h/ can only appear before a vowel, not before a consonant or at the end of a syllable. The pronunciation of the is also a tossup between /æ/ as in hat, /ɑ/ as in spa, and for traditional New York accents, /eə/ as in man. So while it isn't too hard to guess since /ɑ/ is the most common match for foreign words with , it's not a 100% guessable name even using the English rules.
Cuomo is just being an asshole, though.
If you drop the h and just use plausible vowels I think it's basically fine. It'll keep you from saying Zor-han at least.
For sure, I just enjoy pointing out the ways that people could reasonably be fucking up his name without even realizing.
Admittedly I never considered how people are pronouncing his first name, where I'm more understanding (I didn't even know he pronounces the 'h', I thought it was silent), I actually meant more they keep saying his last name as 'Mandami' or 'Mandani'
Ah, gotcha. Even with Mamdani, I can see why people might flip the consonants on the first try. English tends to assimilate nasal consonants - /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/ (as in song) - to match the mouth position of whatever consonant follows them. In the case of /d/, that would mean the expected nasal before it would be /n/, because they're both pronounced with the tip of the tongue and /m/ uses the lips, so flipping the place of the /m/ and the /n/ makes it fit better with the expected phonetic structure of English words and I would believe people doing it accidentally because the brain likes familiar patterns. BIG HOWEVER, we still do allow clusters of /md/ in some rare words like Camden and where two morphemes (units of meaning) meet, like in ram+-ed becoming rammed /ræmd/. So if you consistently fuck Mamdani's name up when he's your biggest political opponent, you are probably being an asshole and probably playing it up for racists, because after the first correction it should not be a problem to straighten out the consonants in his name
yeah, i know, but based on the pronunciation attempts i hear on youtube, whatever technique they were taught did not stick. when confronted with, let's say, the name of a german town, they'll skip over half the letters. they dont produce what i'd expect if i tried to pronounce the word with an american accent. in fact, what comes out often bears no relation to the letters in the word.
and no, i dont mean that they dont know the "special" rules of german spelling (w, v, sch, etc), that'd be one thing. this is some strange ballistic relationship with pronunciation.
People just guess at pronunciations like they're a human autocomplete. Thanks Reading Recovery!
there's always going to be some of that, but i sort of naively expected people to be consistent enough in their mispronunciations that a native speaker (of the other language, not english) would be able to recognise what word they're trying to go for.
but this isnt even that, this is the name of an american. americans really should be used to asking how a name is pronounced and then being careful with it, cos there's names really are a wild wild west
Anglos managed to stumble into Chinese/Japanese "how this character is pronounced" problem, despite using alphabetical writing!
YES!
Let's hope they will adopt furigana.
I'm not at all joking about the autocomplete thing, to be clear. Kids learning to read have literally been taught to guess words based on the first couple of letters and the surrounding context. The rules of spelling to pronunciation correspondence - however complex they are - are treated as a fallback for when context and guessing don't work. I see it all the time. If they don't have the instinct to sound out words in a random paragraph, they're probably not going to start doing it for some random person that they aren't ever going to directly interact with.